The multi-billion-euro National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) is this weekend worth less than all the monies taxpayers have paid into it since its launch seven years ago, the Sunday Tribune can reveal.

The news comes at a politically-sensitive time for the fund after the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, last week ordered a review of its future amid speculation he plans, at a minimum, to freeze the annual €1.6bn that taxpayers pay into it.

Some economists say the government should go further and use the pension fund to re-capitalise the banks, if it were to part-nationalise the lenders, as the Americans, British and French have done in recent days.

Figures requested from the NPRF on Friday show that by the end of September the fund was worth only €2.24bn more than the €16.45bn taxpayers have paid into it since 2001. But since then, the investments it holds overseas in the shares and corporate bonds of companies have seen the worst collapse at any time of the fund's history, meaning the fund is deeply in the red.

An NPRF spokesman said the fund publishes quarterly figures only. "October was volatile," a spokesman added.

The value of the fund at the end of September was worth only €18.6bn, down from €21.1bn at the start of the year. The fund was set up in 2001 by then finance minister Charlie McCreevy with an initial kickstart of €4bn, including receipts from the privatisation of Eircom, to help meet some of the state's pension liabilities from 2025.

With the government needing to borrow at least €10bn annually over the next few years, continuing to pay into the fund means that future contributions would be from borrowed monies.

A Sunday Tribune analysis of the fund's investments at the end of last year highlights its exposure to the global banking crisis and steep recession in many countries.

In the US, which accounts for the fund's single largest investments, some €130m worth of shares were held in Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia and Wells Fargo. In Iceland, the fund at the end of last year held €1.4m of shares in Glitnir, the collapsed bank.

In Britain, the fund had about €50m of its €766m of total British investments in banks and developers, including Alliance & Leicester, Aviva, Barratt Developments, British Land, HBoS, Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland and Northern Rock.

In Germany, where the fund held €1.9bn, it had invested at the end of last year €152m in Allianz, €91m in Deutsche Bank and owned 420,163 shares in Hypo Real Estate, the lender bailed out by the German government over a week ago.